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Sunday, November 19th, 2023
| Time | Event |
| 12:59a | OpenAI Investors Plot Last-Minute Push With Microsoft To Reinstate Sam Altman As CEO The Verge reports that OpenAI's board "is in discussions with Sam Altman to return to the company as its CEO, according to multiple people familiar with the matter." But one of those people said Altman "is 'ambivalent' about coming back and would want significant governance changes." In a possibly related development, Forbes reports that "A day after OpenAI's board of directors fired former CEO Sam Altman in a shock development, investors in the company are plotting how to restore him, in what would amount to an even more surprising counter-coup." Venture capital firms holding positions in OpenAI's for-profit entity have discussed working with Microsoft and senior employees at the company to bring back Altman, even as he has signaled to some that he intends to launch a new startup, four sources told Forbes. Whether the companies would be able to exert enough pressure to pull off such a move — and do it fast enough to keep Altman interested — is unclear. The playbook, a source told Forbes would be straightforward: make OpenAI's new management, under acting CEO Mira Murati and the remaining board, accept that their situation was untenable through a combination of mass revolt by senior researchers, withheld cloud computing credits from Microsoft, and a potential lawsuit from investors. Facing such a combination, the thinking is that management would have to accept Altman back, likely leading to the subsequent departure of those believed to have pushed for Altman's removal, including cofounder Ilya Sutskever and board director Adam D'Angelo, the CEO of Quora. Should such an effort not come together in time, Altman and OpenAI ex-president Greg Brockman were set to raise capital for a new startup, two sources said. "If they don't figure it out asap, they'd just go ahead with Newco," one source added. Also from the Verge: people close to OpenAI "say more departures are in the works". The Information confirms Altman "has been telling investors that he is planning to launch a new AI venture." They also report that Altman "has been in discussions with semiconductor executives, including chip designer Arm, on Friday morning about early efforts to design new chips that would lower costs for large-language model companies like OpenAI, a person familiar with the talks said. That effort would likely take years." 
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| 2:59a | Kotlin Keeps Climbing TIOBE's Programming Language Popularity Index An anonymous reader shared this report from InfoWorld: JetBrains' Kotlin language, a Java rival endorsed by Google for Android mobile development, continues to scale up Tiobe's index of language popularity, reaching the 15th spot in the November 2023 rankings... Software quality services company Tiobe cites Kotlin advantages including interoperability with Java and unrivaled Android accommodations as reasons for the language's rise. Kotlin, Tiobe CEO Paul Jansen said, also fits in with a modern programming culture of expressive languages that have a strong type system and avoid null pointer exceptions by design. "Based on my experience, I am pretty sure Kotlin can reach a top 10 position," Jansen said. It remains to be seen if it can ever scale as high as a top four slot, he added... In the rival Pypl Popularity of Programming languages index this month, Kotlin was ranked 13th with a 1.76% share, having slipped slightly year-over-year. Kotlin's rank on the TIOBE index rose three positions in the last month — after rising two positions the month before. TIOBE's CEO says the language has now achieved its highest ranking ever on the index, surpassing 2017's "first wave of Kotlin popularity...when Google announced first class support for Kotlin on Android." Rust now ranks #20 on the index, behind Delphi/Object Pascal, Swift, Ruby, and R. Here's TIOBE November rankings for top-20 most popular programming languages: PythonCC++JavaC#JavaScriptPHPVisual BasicSQLAssembly LanguageScratchFortranGoMATLABKotlinDelp
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| 4:58a | In World's Largest Disinformation Campaign Online, China Is Harassing Americans "The Chinese government has built up the world's largest known online disinformation operation," reports CNN, "and is using it to harass US residents, politicians, and businesses." CNN reports that disinformation operation is even "at times threatening its targets with violence, a CNN review of court documents and public disclosures by social media companies has found." The onslaught of attacks — often of a vile and deeply personal nature — is part of a well-organized, increasingly brazen Chinese government intimidation campaign targeting people in the United States, documents show. The U.S. State Department says the tactics are part of a broader multi-billion-dollar effort to shape the world's information environment and silence critics of Beijing that has expanded under President Xi Jinping... Victims face a barrage of tens of thousands of social media posts that call them traitors, dogs, and racist and homophobic slurs. They say it's all part of an effort to drive them into a state of constant fear and paranoia. Often, these victims don't know where to turn. Some have spoken to law enforcement, including the FBI — but little has been done. While tech and social media companies have shut down thousands of accounts targeting these victims, they're outpaced by a slew of new accounts emerging virtually every day. Known as "Spamouflage" or "Dragonbridge," the network's hundreds of thousands of accounts spread across every major social media platform have not only harassed Americans who have criticized the Chinese Communist Party, but have also sought to discredit U.S. politicians, disparage American companies at odds with China's interests and hijack online conversations around the globe that could portray the CCP in a negative light. Some numbers from the article: Meta "announced in August it had taken down a cluster of nearly 8,000 accounts attributed to this group in the second quarter of 2023 alone." YouTube owner Google "told CNN it had shut down more than 100,000 associated accounts in recent years." X "has blocked hundreds of thousands of China 'state-backed' or "state-linked" accounts, according to company blogs."
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| 8:34a | Could AI and Tech Advancements Bring a New Era of Evolution? A professor of religion at Columbia University writes, "I do not think human beings are the last stage in the evolutionary process." Whatever comes next will be neither simply organic nor simply machinic but will be the result of the increasingly symbiotic relationship between human beings and technology. Bound together as parasite/host, neither people nor technologies can exist apart from the other because they are constitutive prostheses of each other... So-called "artificial" intelligence is the latest extension of the emergent process through which life takes ever more diverse and complex forms. The article lists "four trajectories that will be increasingly important for the symbiotic relationship between humans and machines." - Writing about neuroprosthetics, the professor argues that "Increasing possibilities for symbiotic relations between computers and brains will lead to alternative forms of intelligence that are neither human nor machinic, but something in between." - Then there's biobots. The article argues that with nanotechnology, "it will be increasingly difficult to distinguish the natural from the artificial." But there's also an interesting discussion about synthetic biology. "Michael Levin and his colleagues at the Allen Discovery Center of Tufts University — biologists, computer scientists and engineers — have created "xenobots," which are "biological robots" that were produced from embryonic skin and muscle cells from an African clawed frog." As Levin and his colleagues wrote in 2020... Here we show a scalable pipeline for creating functional novel lifeforms: AI methods automatically design diverse candidate lifeforms in silico to perform some desired function, and transferable designs are then created using a cell-based construction toolkit to realize living systems with predicted behavior. Although some steps in this pipeline still require manual intervention, complete automation in the future would pave the way for designing and deploying living systems for a wide range of functions. And the article concludes with a discussion of organic-relational AI: While Levin uses computational technology to create and modify biological organisms, the German neurobiologist Peter Robin Hiesinger uses biological organisms to model computational processes by creating algorithms that evolve. This work involves nothing less than developing a new form of "artificial" intelligence... Non-anthropocentric AI would not be merely an imitation of human intelligence, but would be as different from our thinking as fungi, dog and crow cognition is from human cognition. Machines are becoming more like people and people are becoming more like machines. Organism and machine? Organism or machine? Neither organism nor machine? Evolution is not over; something new, something different, perhaps infinitely and qualitatively different, is emerging. Who would want the future to be the endless repetition of the past?
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| 12:34p | Raspberry Pi OS, elementary OS Will Default to Wayland Recently the Register pointed out that the new (Debian-based) Raspberry Pi OS 5.0 has "a completely new Wayland desktop environment replacing PIXEL, the older desktop based on LXDE and X.org, augmented with Mutter in its previous release." And when elementary OS 8 finally arrives, "the development team plans to finally shift to the Wayland display server by default," reports Linux magazine (adding "If you'd like to get early access to daily builds, you can do so by becoming an elementary OS sponsor on GitHub.") "This is a transition that we have been planning and working towards for several years," writes CEO/co-founder Danielle Foré, "and we're finally in the home stretch... Wayland will bring us improved performance, better app security, and opens the doors to support more complex display setups like mixed DPI multi-monitor setups." There are other things that we're experimenting with, like the possibility of an immutable OS, and there are more mundane things that will certainly happen like shipping Pipewire. You'll also see on the project board that we're looking to replace the onscreen keyboard and it's time to re-evaluate some things like SystemD Boot. You can expect lots more little features to be detailed over the coming months. Meanwhile, Linux Mint is getting "experimental" Wayland support next month. And also in December, Firefox will let Wayland support be enabled by default. And last month the Register noted a merge request for GNOME to remove the gnome-xorg.desktop file. "To put this in context, the Fedora project is considering a comparable change: removing or hiding the GNOME on X.org session from the login menu, which is already the plan for the Fedora KDE spin when it moves to KDE version 6, which is still in development."
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| 3:34p | How Mojo Hopes to Revamp Python for an AI World Python "come with downsides," argues a new article in Communications of the ACM. "Its programs tend to run slowly, and because it is inefficient at running processes in parallel, it is not well suited to some of the latest AI programming." "Hoping to overcome those difficulties, computer scientist Chris Lattner set out to create a new language, Mojo, which offers the ease of use of Python, but the performance of more complex languages such as C++ or Rust." Lattner tells the site "we don't want to break Python, we want to make Python better," while software architect Doug Meil says Mojo is essentially "Python for AI... and it's going to be way faster in scale across multiple hardware platforms." Lattner teamed up with Tim Davis, whom he had met when they both worked for Google, to form Modular in January 2022. The company, where Lattner is chief executive officer and Davis chief product officer, provides support for companies working on AI and is developing Mojo. A modern AI programming stack generally has Python on top, Lattner says, but because that is an inefficient language, it has C++ underneath to handle the implementation. The C++ then must communicate with performance accelerators or GPUs, so developers add a platform such as Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) to make efficient use of those GPUs. "Mojo came from the need to unify these three different parts of the stack so that we could build a unified solution that can scale up and down," Lattner says. The result is a language with the same syntax as Python, so people used to programming in Python can adopt it with little difficulty, but which, by some measures, can run up to 35,000 times faster. For AI, Mojo is especially fast at performing the matrix multiplications used in many neural networks because it compiles the multiplication code to run directly on the GPU, bypassing CUDA... "Increasingly, code is not being written by computer programmers. It's being written by doctors and journalists and chemists and gamers," says Jeremy Howard, an honorary professor of computer science at the University of Queensland, Australia, and a co-founder of fast.ai, a. "All data scientists write code, but very few data scientists would consider themselves professional computer programmers." Mojo attempts to fill that need by being a superset of Python. A program written in Python can be copied into Mojo and will immediately run faster, the company says. The speedup comes from a variety of factors. For instance, Mojo, like other modern languages, enables threads, small tasks that can be run simultaneously, rather than in sequence. Instead of using an interpreter to execute code as Python does, Mojo uses a compiler to turn the code into assembly language. Mojo also gives developers the option of using static typing, which defines data elements and reduces the number of errors... "Static behavior is good because it leads to performance," Lattner says. "Static behavior is also good because it leads to more correctness and safety guarantees." Python creator Guido van Rossum "says he is interested to watch how Mojo develops and whether it can hit the lofty goals Lattner is setting for it..." according to the article, " but he emphasizes that the language is in its early stages and, as of July 2023, Mojo had not yet been made available for download." In June, Lattner did an hour-long interview with the TWIML AI podcast. And in 2017 Chris Lattner answered questions from Slashdot's readers.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| 4:34p | Archaeologists Unearth a Secret Lost Language From 3,000 Years Ago "And no, it's not COBOL," jokes long-time Slashdot reader schwit1, sharing this report from ScienceAlert: A secret text has been discovered in Türkiye, scattered among tens of thousands of ancient clay tablets, which were written in the time of the Hittite Empire during the second millennium BCE. No one yet knows what the curious cuneiform script says, but it seems to be a long-lost language from more than 3,000 years ago. Experts say the mysterious idiom is unlike any other ancient written language found in the Middle East, although it seems to share roots with other Anatolian-Indo-European languages. The sneaky scrawlings start at the end of a cultic ritual text written in Hittite — the oldest known Indo-European tongue — after an introduction that essentially translates to: "From now on, read in the language of the country of Kalasma"... Currently, there are no available photos of the newly discovered tablet with Kalamaic writings, as experts are still working out how to translate it. Schwemer and his colleagues hope to publish their results along with images of their discovery sometime next year.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| 5:34p | 1993's 'Second Reality' Demo Recreated for the Apple II Long-time Slashdot reader deater writes: The Second Reality demoscene demo from 1993 is one of the most well known demos of all time, pushing a 486 running DOS to its limits. There have been remakes for other architectures over the years, including Atari ST, Gameboy color, and Commodore 64. At this past Demosplash 2023 demoparty a version for the Apple II was released (and won 1st place), which was quite a challenge as the Apple II graphics have essentially none of the hardware acceleration available on the other platforms.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| 6:34p | The FSF Condemns Unauthorized Derivatives of GNU Licenses The Free Sofware Foundation issued a clarifying blog post this week, saying the organization is "pleased when people use GNU licenses to distribute and license software." But "we condemn the use of unauthorized, confusing derivatives of the licenses." Unfortunately, some authors engage in confusing practices by drafting licenses using existing terms and conditions of GNU free software licenses, without the intention of granting all four freedoms to users. For example, we have long seen attempts to add restrictions to the license text itself, placed in the LICENSE file, or included elsewhere in the program's release. An example is the so-called "Commons Clause," which, when applied to a free software license, affirms that the program is covered by the license. But, at the same time, is contradicting in its meaning by asserting that selling copies of the program or implementing a commercial service with the program is prohibited. The immediate consequence of the practice of inserting a restriction into a GNU license in this way is the confusion it causes for the community. Users still see the name of the original license, with its preamble and terms and conditions intact, transmitting a strong message that the purpose of the license is to enable users — grant users — their essential software freedoms. This message is clear from the license's text, and is bolstered from the renown accrued by the FSF and GNU trademarks, and their decades of free software advocacy. At the same time, these same users see a contradictory statement of the "Commons Clause," which is clearly contrary to the sprit of the free software movement and the Free Software Definition... [T]o make it even clearer that added restrictions are incompatible with our license, we gave users the right to delete such added restrictions [in 2007] and preserve the program's freedom. But we at the FSF have another legal tool against attempts to release programs under GNU General Public Licenses that have been wrongly altered to become nonfree licenses. The FSF holds copyrights and common law trademarks to the GNU family of General Public Licenses. Moreover, the FSF holds registered trademarks for "FSF," "Free Software Foundation," and "GNU." [...] We can't control the drafting by others of proprietary software licenses, but we can and do forbid doing this in a way that misleadingly associates those licenses with GNU or GNU licenses... [W]e are entitled to legally enforce our copyright and trademark for FSF licenses that have been altered by added restrictions to a verbatim GNU license... Licenses that confuse users about the freedoms they grant are damaging to the free software movement because they threaten to dilute the value and power of these licenses. When GNU licenses are misused through such confusing practices, it harms the renown accrued by the GNU project and the FSF over decades of free software advocacy. It is our duty to all computer users to stop these practices, and, if necessary, we will use our legal rights to this end.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| 7:34p | Linux Foundation Announces Intent to Form 'High Performance Software Foundation' This week the Linux Foundation "announced the intention to form the High Performance Software Foundation. "Through a series of technical projects, the High Performance Software Foundation aims to build, promote, and advance a portable software stack for high performance computing by increasing adoption, lowering barriers to contribution, and supporting development efforts." As use of high performance computing becomes ubiquitous in scientific computing and digital engineering, and AI use cases multiply, more and more data centers deploy GPUs and other compute accelerators. The High Performance Software Foundation intends to leverage investments made by the United States Department of Energy's Exascale Computing Project, the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, and other international projects in accelerated high performance computing to exploit the performance of this diversifying set of architectures. As an umbrella project under the Linux Foundation, HPSF intends to provide a neutral space for pivotal projects in the high performance software ecosystem, enabling industry, academia, and government entities to collaborate together on the scientific software stack. The High Performance Software Foundation already benefits from strong support across the high performance computing landscape, including leading companies and organizations like Amazon Web Services, Argonne National Laboratory, CEA, CIQ, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Intel, Kitware, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, NVIDIA, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratory, and the University of Oregon. Its first open source technical projects include: Spack: the high performance computing package managerKokkos: a performance-portable programming model for writing modern C++ applications in a hardware-agnostic way.AMReX: a performance-portable software framework designed to accelerate solving partial differential equations on block-structured, adaptively refined meshes.WarpX: a performance-portable Particle-in-Cell code with advanced algorithms that won the 2022 Gordon Bell PrizeTrilinos: a collection of reusable scientific software libraries, known in particular for linear, non-linear, and transient solvers, as well as optimization and uncertainty quantification.Apptainer: a container system and image format specifically designed for secure high-performance computing.VTK-m: a toolkit of scientific visualization algorithms for accelerator architectures.HPCToolkit: performance measurement and analysis tools for computers ranging from laptops to the world's largest GPU-accelerated supercomputers.E4S: the Extreme-scale Scientific Software StackCharliecloud: high performance computing-tailored, lightweight, fully unprivileged container implementation.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| 8:34p | Amazon Announces 'Olympus' LLM to Compete With OpenAI and Google Amazon "is investing millions in training an ambitious large language model," reports Reuters, "hoping it could rival top models from OpenAI and Alphabet, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters." The model, codenamed as "Olympus", has 2 trillion parameters, the people said, which could make it one of the largest models being trained. OpenAI's GPT-4 model, one of the best models available, is reported to have one trillion parameters... The team is spearheaded by Rohit Prasad, former head of Alexa, who now reports directly to CEO Andy Jass... Amazon believes having homegrown models could make its offerings more attractive on AWS, where enterprise clients want to access top-performing models, the people familiar with the matter said, adding there is no specific timeline for releasing the new model. "While the parameter count doesn't automatically mean Olympus will outperform GPT-4, it's probably a good bet that it will, at minimum, be very competitive with its rival from OpenAI," argues a financial writer at the Motley Fool — as well as Googles nascent AI projects. Amazon could have a key advantage over its competition, one that CEO Andy Jassy alluded to in the company's third-quarter earnings call. Jassy said, "Customers want to bring the models to their data, not the other way around. And much of that data resides in AWS [Amazon Web Services] as the clear market segment leader in cloud infrastructure...." Amazon will likely also leverage Olympus in other ways. For example, the company could make its CodeWhisperer generative AI coding companion more powerful. Jassy noted in the Q3 call that all of Amazon's "significant businesses are working on generative AI applications to transform their customer experiences." Olympus could make those initiatives even more transformative. They point out that Amazon's profits more than tripled in the third quarter of 2023 from where they were in 2022. And Amazon's stock price has already jumped more than 40% in 2023.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| 9:34p | Microsoft Celebrates 20th Anniversary of 'Patch Tuesday' This week the Microsoft Security Response Center celebrated the 20th anniversary of Patch Tuesday updates. In a blog post they call the updates "an initiative that has become a cornerstone of the IT world's approach to cybersecurity." Originating from the Trustworthy Computing memo by Bill Gates in 2002, our unwavering commitment to protecting customers continues to this day and is reflected in Microsoft's Secure Future Initiative announced this month. Each month, we deliver security updates on the second Tuesday, underscoring our pledge to cyber defense. As we commemorate this milestone, it's worth exploring the inception of Patch Tuesday and its evolution through the years, demonstrating our adaptability to new technology and emerging cyber threats... Before this unified approach, our security updates were sporadic, posing significant challenges for IT professionals and organizations in deploying critical patches in a timely manner. Senior leaders of the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) at the time spearheaded the idea of a predictable schedule for patch releases, shifting from a "ship when ready" model to a regular weekly, and eventually, monthly cadence... This led to a shift from a "ship when ready" model to a regular weekly, and eventually, monthly cadence. In addition to consolidating patch releases into a monthly schedule, we also organized the security update release notes into a consolidated location. Prior to this change, customers had to navigate through various Knowledge Base articles, making it difficult to find the information they needed to secure themselves. Recognizing the need for clarity and convenience, we provided a comprehensive overview of monthly releases. This change was pivotal at a time when not all updates were delivered through Windows Update, and customers needed a reliable source to find essential updates for various products. Patch Tuesday has also influenced other vendors in the software and hardware spaces, leading to a broader industry-wide practice of synchronized security updates. This collaborative approach, especially with hardware vendors such as AMD and Intel, aims to provide a united front against vulnerabilities, enhancing the overall security posture of our ecosystems. While the volume and complexity of updates have increased, so has the collaboration with the security community. Patch Tuesday has fostered better relationships with security researchers, leading to more responsible vulnerability disclosures and quicker responses to emerging threats... As the landscape of security threats evolves, so does our strategy, but our core mission of safeguarding our customers remains unchanged.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| 10:34p | A Viral Post on Social Media Will Clear the Medical Debt of Strangers "To celebrate my life, I've arranged to buy up others' medical debt and then destroy the debt," reads a posthumous tweet posted Tuesday after the death of 38-year-old Casey McIntyre. The Washington Post explains... McIntyre, who served as publisher at Razorbill, an imprint of Penguin Random House, was diagnosed in 2019 and proceeded through treatment without taking on debt, [husband Andrew Rose] Gregory told The Washington Post. But many fellow cancer patients she met were in more precarious financial positions, Gregory added. "We were both so keenly aware that Casey had great health insurance through Penguin Random House," said Gregory, 41. "Casey had no medical debt...." About nine months before McIntyre died, her husband came across a video online about members of a North Carolina church who purchased nearly $3.3 million of local residents' medical debt for $15,048 in a "debt jubilee," a historical reference to ancient stories about personal debts being canceled at regular intervals. The couple chose to make monthly donations to RIP Medical Debt, the same organization that partnered with the North Carolina churchgoers. The nonprofit organization aims to abolish medical debt "at pennies on the dollar," according to its website. For every $100 donated, the company relieves $10,000 of medical debt. As of Saturday, nearly $200,000 had been donated to RIP Medical Debt in McIntyre's memory, which would wipe out approximately $20 million of unpaid medical bills. [By Sunday afternoon it had risen to over $334,000...] Allison Sesso, president and chief executive of RIP Medical Debt, said her organization found out about McIntyre's case after McIntyre's posthumous social media post went viral. Sesso said the pace of donations was record-setting for her charity. "What an incredible gesture to the world as you're exiting," Sesso told The Post. "This final act of generosity is blowing up. The amount that they're raising and the rate at which this has gone is not something that we're used to." McIntyre's post on X has now received 65,400 likes — and 3,086 reposts.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
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